Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 – Review
After the long-running, sometimes warm, sometimes lukewarm reception of Destiny 2 (I never made it more than half a dozen hours or so), the far more recent consumer disappointment in Anthem, and with Borderlands 3 still off in the distance, The Division 2 has found itself in both a state of opportunity and trepidation. Loot shooter enthusiasts, hungry for the next generation of games, are also weary of dropping triple-A cash on another game that either stumbles out of the gate or limps to the finish line over its expected multi-year lifespan. With those concerns in mind, I am happy to report that The Division 2 lives up to nearly every expectation. The post-apocalyptic city is home to action-packed story missions in unique locations, dangerous open world encounters, three thrilling Player vs Player vs Environment Dark Zones, and enough to see and do to satisfy both short-time players and long-term gear grinders. The Division 2 takes place 7 months later and 225 miles further southwest from The Division in an evacuated Washington D.C. The Green Flu epidemic that devastated New York City, killing millions, throwing the city into chaos, and triggering mass evacuations, has become a global pandemic. The Division is an organization of seemingly ordinary people who were activated to prevent the downfall of society, strengthening and restructuring governments at every level, to help preserve the way of life. A ruined Washington D.C. is a beautiful disaster. Much like The Division’s New York City, Washington D.C. is lovingly recreated in exhaustively researched detail, and then filled with post-apocalyptic horror. The streets, parks, monuments, offices, apartments, and overgrown foliage are filled with executed civilians, body bags, mountains of contaminated biomaterial, trash, furniture, and all kinds of combat cover like abandoned vehicles, emergency response checkpoints, concrete barriers, and some unusually robust tarp covered fences. D.C. itself is a living, breathing organism, with a day/night cycle and weather system that offers rainy nights and foggy mornings that make the same street feel very different when approached from a different angle at a different time. Office building blocks, the National Mall with its monuments, underground tunnels, building interiors, and apartment blocks all look and feel very different and make for fun exploration and sight-seeing, and wildlife such as deer, raccoons, foxes, cats, and dogs wander the city uninhibited. Missions take place in unique, distinctive environments that are as interesting to explore as they are to fight in. Famous monuments such as the Lincoln Memorial and the US Capitol become strongholds for enemy factions, and missions find you fighting through the Air and Space Museum, American History Museum, the Space Administration HQ, and many other locations. The added benefit in a loot shooter such as The Division is that as long-term players go back and replay missions, there’s plenty of variety of environment, plus plenty to see that wasn’t noticed on previous playthroughs, and make good use of The Division 2’s built in photo mode. I played The Division 2 on the Xbox One S in 4K. The One S had a difficult time keeping up with the intense graphical requirements. Graphic rendering is a constant issue, as textures at moderate distance appear significantly blurry for several seconds until fully rendered. Running through the city augments this effect as the graphics struggle to keep up. Once rendered, however, the attention to detail and the horrible beauty all around cannot be ignored. The combat system stays true to the first Division, which is a welcome comfort. The Division 2 is a 3rd person cover shooter that allows players to carry two primary weapons – choosing among rifles, assault rifles, submachine guns, light machine guns, marksman rifles, and shotguns – a sidearm with unlimited ammunition, and two skill powers with a large variety of offensive and defensive capabilities. After completing the story and reaching the highest level, one of three specializations that offer a high-end weapon with rare, specialized ammunition. Upgrading these weapons and wearable armor with higher level version with better stats, specializations, and modifications is the name of the loot shooter game. You’ll need every advantage you can muster, as enemy AI is clever and will constantly keep you on your toes. Enemies will constantly reposition, making use of different types of attackers to keep you off balance and moving. Some attackers will rush in and try to flank you with melee attacks, suicide bombs, or flamethrowers. Machine gunners will lie down prone and try to keep you suppressed while other attackers do their work. Snipers hang back and above and deploy some devastating attacks if you stay in their view for too long. And heavily armored elites will constantly move toward you, sometimes carrying large machine guns, sometimes swinging a devastating sledgehammer. Taking on a squad requires strategy, patience, and proper use of skills and weapons or you can be quickly overwhelmed. Bullet sponge enemies from the first Division have changed into enemies with armor that will break off if you keep attacking certain pieces of it, so while you can still empty multiple magazines of the hardest hitting weapons into one guy without killing him, a strategic player can take them down far more quickly by focusing on one place until the armor breaks off and their health can finally be damaged. Every part of the game can be completed single handed. At no point are you required to join in with a squad of friends or random other players to be take on the open world, missions, side-missions, the Dark Zone, or anywhere else in the game. However, playing through missions on even a normal difficulty level alone is challenging at least and near impossible at worst. Fortunately, there are a number of easy, low/no commitment matchmaking options for teaming up. I completed most of the missions in a group with random other players who were all at about my progression level. By simply walking up to the start of the mission area and selecting match make, I was joined
The Minecraft Movie Plot, Director and Release Date Confirmed
The Minecraft movie was first due to release this year then it was delayed due to a disagreement with some people and all of that jazz. Well today, more details were announced including a NEW date and a plot! From Minecraft.net, the article reads: “That date is March 4, 2022!” While that may seem like a long way away, that is because it is. But in all seriousness, it’s not that far away. I am sure the years will fly…I hope. As for the plot, the article goes on to say: ” we’ll tell you the story of a teenage girl and her unlikely group of adventurers. After the malevolent Ender Dragon sets out on a path of destruction, they must save their beautiful, blocky Overworld.” This is a very Minecrafty style storyline. As Minecraft has no official storyline, lots of people (including the people working on the movie) seem to think that the storyline is to kill the ender dragon. But this one takes a twist! The director for this movie will be Peter Sollett with Warner Bros taking over the production of it. This looks good! What do you think? Source
Xbox E3 2019 Conference Confirmed For June 9th
E3 is less than two months away and probably the biggest company attending the event this year is Microsoft. The folks over there have finally revealed that the Xbox E3 Briefing will take place June 9th at 1 PM PDT and 4 PM Eastern. As usual the company claims this will be their biggest conference which means it’ll most likely top last years where that had a lot of unexpected titles on stage. The conference will be at the Microsoft Theater again at the Xbox Plaza in Los Angeles. At this years event there will be the Xbox Experience and the official Xbox Gear Shop which was there last year. During the show there will be giveaways for viewers on Mixer so if you are into free stuff we advise you go there and don’t miss out. We don’t know exactly what will be shown at the Xbox E3 Briefing, but Bonnie Ross confirmed that Halo Infinite will have a presence on stage again showing off more. It’s obvious we’ll see Gears of War 5 as it was shown last year and is aimed for a release later in 2019. Another thing to look out for is world premieres or early looks at some of the newly acquired studios Microsoft acquired last year. We should expect a lot of great games shown off this E3 and it’ll be exciting. Ubisoft & Bethesda will also have conferences while EA and Sony will be skipping their traditional conferences. Stay tuned for more news regarding Xbox at E3 in June. Source
Sony Releases New Details On Next-Gen Console
It has been rumored that both Sony and Microsoft are planning to release their next generation consoles in the year 2020. This year we’ve seen talks about what the specs of both consoles could look like, but Sony has finally shared some more information on whats to be the PlayStation 5. Here is what we know so far about the next PlayStation console: Will include PlayStation 4 backward compatibility SSD support PlayStation VR & 8K support Ray tracing support & ‘3D audio’ A more powerful CPU/GPU Devkits are being sent out. Supports discs It’s good to see that Sony’s next console will support physical discs since we are turning into more of a digital generation and this could be the last generation that’ll support physical games. Another great thing to note is the backward compatibility from the previous console as the PS4 couldn’t support PS3 games and fans had to re-buy games that they might have owned in the past. It’s hard to see 8K being supported within the next five to ten years, but who knows it’s good to have that option there if 8K monitors & televisions become more relevant. An example that Wired told was that Mark Cerny compared Spider-Man on the current generation console and showed it on the early devkit version and when fast traveling what took 15 seconds now only took 0.8 seconds. The next generation is going to be exciting and now we’ll have to wait and see what Microsoft will come up with especially with Project Xcloud. Source
More Coming For God Of War Fans For 1 Year Anniversary, Director Confirms It’s Not DLC
This coming Saturday, Santa Monica Studios’ God of War will be turning a year old and in celebration for the anniversary of the game’s first full year, something related to the game will be dropping at some point in the near future. As the studio already released a free PlayStation 4 theme and avatar for the big year one, Game Director Cory Barlog shares “that’s not all” for commemorating the 2018 reboot. Resulting with fans jumping towards speculation surrounding potential downloadable content for the action adventure title to follow the game becoming a year old. But following the noise surrounding the ‘what if’ chance of DLC coming to God of War soon after came to an end as Barlog confirms that it isn’t new content. Just so no one gets the wrong idea – there is no DLC coming for the game. Sorry. — golrab of the frost (@corybarlog) April 14, 2019 As Barlog has already explained prior to this back in January, the idea for DLC was in the air for some time, but ultimately the project was canned as “it was too ambitious” for just an expansion for the game. Predicting what the Director has planned to revealed is left unknown as Barlog didn’t expand on what’s to come for God of War. But as the game’s anniversary is only five days away, it won’t be too long of a wait until we get official word on what exactly will be coming. Read up on our review for the Game Awards’ Game of the Year Winner here. God of War is out now for PlayStation 4.
Rumor: Battlefield Bad Company 3 In The Works For Next-Generation Consoles
For nearly the past decade fans have been anticipating a third installment for Battlefield: Bad Company side series from Swedish developer DICE. But as each rumor passes annually, we always receive the same result as the studio pops out a more traditional Battlefield title. With Battlefield 3, Battlefield 4, Battlefield: Hardline, Battlefield 1, and now Battlefield V, fans are still hopeful that DICE will eventually decide to make a trilogy out of the Bad Company franchise. Now according to a recent rumor that surfaced back in December on Pastebin, we might finally receive the Bad Company 3 fans have all been waiting for. Just recently noise sparked around the potential leak and many have been grabbing at the information that was provided in the post. Stated in the post to be coming from a “third-party small developer from the EU”, they give details primarily revolving around Sony’s upcoming PlayStation 5 console like the hardware’s capabilities, official reveal, and launch date. Other information shown in the post details that Bad Company 3 is being developed for Sony’s unannounced platform. This which strikes it to be odd as marketing rights for the most part surrounding the Battlefield franchise circulates around Microsoft and the company’s Xbox platform. Another AAA title that is said to be in development for the upcoming console is the leaked Harry Potter title that is said to be developed by Avalanche Software. What makes the Bad Company rumor seem probable is from rumor of the then-rumored Battlefield V to be set in WWII. At the time, it was shared that DICE isn’t planning to return to a more modern era of Battlefield for the 2018 title, but assuming the following title that will release in 2020 will be the one which reintroduces modern warfare. Which many speculated as DICE’s window to finally bring Bad Company 3 to reality. Do you think the Bad Company rumor is true or just another falsified leak ? Source: Pastebin
The Story For What Could Have Been For Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic 3 Emerges
Back in 2004, Obsidian Entertainment finished up on the development of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 and shipped the highly anticipated sequel in December of that year. Following the game’s release, Obsidian wanted to go straight to developing a succeeding title for the game and make the series a trilogy, but now in 2019 we know that never happened. In an interview with VG24/7, one of the writers for the game that never came to be, Chris Avellone shares what the story might have been if the game was greenlit for development. Avellone elaborating on the game’s plot to follow the events of KOTOR2 with Darth Revan involving the ancient Sith Lords of the galaxy in the ongoing battle between the Jedi and the Sith. “These guys would just be monsters. These would have a level of power that was considerable, but at the same time you’d be able to dig more into their psychologies, and their personalities, their history, and even how they dealt with the player.” The pitched concept would then lead players to travel different planets and moons controlled by the ancient Siths to witness how they created chaos throughout the galaxy. Ultimately giving players the first-experience of what these ancient Sith Lords are capable of. Avellone explained later in the interview that despite Obsidian’s plan to make the series into a trilogy, the studio was passed on the opportunity as the torch was then handed over to LucasArts. But following that the title in the end never picked up any momentum to being developed. The writer also commented on the possibilities of Bioware taking on the challenge of developing Knights of the Old Repubic 3, but the title yet again falls through yet again, multiple times in fact, to coming to reality. Bioware even stating last year that the studio will be prioritizing the then-upcoming title Anthem and shelfed other projects like Mass Effect and the chances of KOTOR3 to be in the works. What are your thoughts on the plot for Knights of the Old Republic 3? Source: VG24/7
A New Lego Star Wars Game Is In Development
As many are aware, the Star Wars Celebration took place this past weekend in Chicago which gave fans some insight on the upcoming film that will be releasing later this year as well as providing the first glimpse of the long awaited Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order from Respawn Entertainment. Amid the event’s planned announcements, one might have slipped accidentally revealing a possible Lego Star Wars to be in development. During The Star Wars Show Live! which was being livestreamed during the event, series-known persona Matthew Wood might have leaked a new title from Traveller’s Tales revolving around the Star Wars Universe in an interview. The Supervising Sound Editor while discussing the coming content for the George Lucas franchise added on to his tangent of shows by unintentionally announcing a Lego Star Wars game to be in the works. “So many things we’re doing right now,” Wood shares in the interview. “We’ve got Mandalorian happening, of course Episode Nine happening, there’s a Lego Star Wars game we’re working on.” Looking at what Wood briefly shared, it is unsure what exactly will come from the unannounced Star Wars-themed Lego title if it will follow the standard formula of translating the upcoming film along with The Last Jedi into a Lego adventure as one bundle like previously or break off with a new title altogether similar to Lego Batman: DC Villains. Previously, I discussed the importance of Lego titles and their diverse ways of laying out a game with Warner Bros. endless arsenal of licensed worlds at their disposal. You can read the piece here. Do you think the new Lego Star Wars title will bring anything new or just adapt both Episode VIII & XI? Source: Eurogamer Matthew Wood randomly said that he is working on new Lego Star Wars game. byu/pawel01ivan inStarWarsLeaks
